Among the loyalists selected by Donald Trump to staff his second administration, Gail Slater stands out for a different reason: she unites right and left with a sceptical view of big business.
While the US president’s other nominees tend to be traditional conservative free market advocates, Slater, his pick to lead the Justice Department’s antitrust division, is expected to maintain the Biden administration’s vigorous approach to enforcement — much to Wall Street’s chagrin.
In public remarks and written submissions to lawmakers, the 53-year-old Oxford graduate has expressed concern about market concentration and said enforcement should be focused on technology and sectors with a direct impact on Americans’ pocketbooks.
Slater embodies the unlikely alignment of progressives who support tough antitrust enforcement and a new generation of populist conservatives helmed by vice-president JD Vance, who has called for the break-up of Google.
While the motivation of the two groups differ — progressives look to curb anti-competitive behaviour and corporate power while maga populists also aim to clamp down on platforms and companies they accuse of censoring conservative voices — the unlikely bipartisanship has spooked Wall Street.
Many corporate leaders loathed the antitrust scrutiny of the Biden administration and fear it may continue under Slater.
“We’re at a point now that it’s not a wildly swinging pendulum from one administration to the other,” said Michael Carrier, professor at Rutgers Law School. “We’re not likely to see the foot being let off the gas completely”.
Born in Dublin, Slater started her legal career in the UK then joined the Federal Trade Commission in 2004, where she worked on high profile cases and advised Julie Brill, an ex-commissioner appointed by Democratic president Barack Obama.
Slater “could easily figure out what was going on in any transaction or conduct under investigation,” said Holly Vedova, the former head of the agency’s competition bureau. “She always had almost like a sixth sense”.
Unlike antitrust officials such as Lina Khan, an academic picked by former president Joe Biden to lead the FTC, Slater spent years working in — or advocating for — the corporate world after leaving the commission, including at Fox Corp, Roku and the now-defunct Internet Association, a lobbying group.
In a move that some found surprising, she joined Trump’s National Economic Council in 2018.
Larry Kudlow, the Fox Business host who was then head of the NEC, said Slater “taught me a lot about 5G and technology” and “made me a hero among the interest groups”.
The White House role cemented Slater’s standing among conservatives. Last year she became an economic adviser to Vance and was an influential voice on antitrust policy in Trump’s transition team following his 2024 electoral win.
Slater’s career is a “fusion of different influences that point to a new direction for competition policy,” said former FTC chair William Kovacic.
This experience has helped her garner the bipartisan support that was on display at her confirmation hearing last month. She is still awaiting Senate confirmation.
Jonathan Kanter, head of the DoJ’s antitrust division under Biden, told the FT that leading the unit “requires the courage to take on the world’s most powerful companies” and is “not for the faint of heart”.
“Gail is a talented antitrust lawyer with top-notch qualifications,” he added.
But Slater’s nomination has unsettled Wall Street. “While we remain hopeful that [deal clearance] will be better than during the Biden administration, it may only be a marginal improvement,” said a veteran dealmaker.
Slater, who declined to comment for this article, has stressed the importance of enforcement, describing it at her hearing as “the tool that we use to stop . . . markets from tipping into the need for regulation”.
In written responses to senators, she said the antitrust division should prioritise sectors that affect Americans’ daily lives, such as agriculture, healthcare, and technology.
She has backed merger guidelines issued under Biden, which have been upheld by the DoJ and Andrew Ferguson, the Trump-appointed FTC chair.
But she also signalled a potential departure from Kanter. We “may take a different approach . . . on settlements in merger cases where effective and robust structural remedies can be implemented without excessively burdening the antitrust division’s resources,” Slater wrote to senators.
Omeed Assefi, acting head of the DoJ’s antitrust unit, said Slater will focus on “promoting robust competition”, but a top deal banker said corporate leaders fear that under Trump, antitrust may be used to punish enemies and reward friends in ways that are unpredictable.
“Under Khan and Kanter we knew they had a specific agenda. It was coherent even if . . . Wall Street disagreed with them. You could navigate it. Now it’s a mess,” he said.
During Slater’s hearing, Democratic senator Amy Klobuchar raised similar concerns that the Trump administration could “use its position as leverage regarding companies that oppose its agenda”.
Slater responded she did not “anticipate” this would happen, adding in written submissions that she would “ensure that all antitrust reviews . . . are based on the facts and the law” and “work to guard against any improper influences”.
But Kovacic cautioned that she will “be ultimately working for an extremely impulsive boss who I’m afraid is going to paint her into a corner . . . by making dramatic pronouncements that are intemperate”.
He added: “How are you going to cope with that?”
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